Recently had a brief coffee chat with a rising superstar group leader at EPFL.
We were discussing how she managed to achieve so much in such a short time, and to become a group leader shortly after her Ph.D.
(many times Ph.D.s will do a super long post doc, or multiple post docs first).
She shared that her supervisor during her own Ph.D. had a crazy tempo:
you meet him 1:1 every week
in that meeting, you have to have a report
the report must contain the following: what experiments you did, rationale, high-quality figures, analysis, what you plan to do next week and what have you done to contribute to the rest of the lab.
Sounds like a lot?
Yeah, she said it was an insane tempo, working hard on the weekends just to finish the report each time… no exceptions.
But…
After about a year of doing this, she had 20 beautiful figures ready for publication.
She shared that, when she felt lost (as most Ph.D. students do at times), at least she had an amazing package of figures, ready to talk about them.
When most other Ph.D. students feel lost, most of the time they don’t have that amount of material to help them get out of it.
What I got from this is that this approach is a good strategy to invest and push yourself to apply.
Maybe not this hard (once a week might be too much), but the approach seems solid and pays off in the long run.
It also just underscores to me that there is simply no replacement for hard, consistent work towards your goals.
Hope you find it useful.
Kenan